Fareed Zakaria apologized to viewers for plagiarism as he returned to his CNN show “GPS” on Sunday:
A final personal note. As some of you know, two weeks ago, I wrote a column in Time Magazine and neglected to quote a New Yorker essay by Jill Lepore that I drew closely from.
I was not trying to pass the work off as my own. I prominently cited the book, “Gun Fight” by Adam Winkler that contained all the historical data that both Lepore and I wrote about it, but I absolutely should have quote[d] or cited the New Yorker essay as well.
It was a mistake, but an honest one and I apologized. Time and CNN conducted exhaustive investigations looking at over 50 pages of research for that column as well as years of my commentary and found nothing to merit further action.
Time said it was entirely satisfied that this was an unintentional* and isolated error. For my part, I just want to say again how sorry I am and let’s get started.
*The transcript originally said “intentional and isolated error.” CNN told us it was a typo and that Zakaria said “unintentional.” They later fixed the transcript and we modified the quote above.
Related: Why some TV plagiarists get punished more than others (The Hollywood Reporter) | Lifestyles of the rich & loquacious (The Atlantic) | “Even if public criticism doesn’t affect their real-world income, it does affect their intellectual standing” (Foreign Policy) | Is social media anti-citation? (Policymic)
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